Virtual Mangroves Seen 360 Degrees – Nipa Palms & Pigs In The View! Would You Believe?

With my browser Vivaldi, on a Facebook page I captured the above image of a visual cum intellectual cum digital display by 360 PH: Virtual Tours Philippines, and you can download the paper, which I just did. Before that, I moved my mouse in a 360-degree turn left to right, right to left, top to bottom, and bottom to top – I fell in love with it!

This is a virtual tug of the heart and mind – which every webinar should go after. There have been no invigorating download offers this year. Now, I am a science journalist, and I could have written on any presentation if I had gotten hold of a copy of the pertinent digital file. The way I look at it, with the above show of a virtual exhibit, 360 PH has changed the history of webinars in at least 2 ways:

1.   Can read & may attend – Download a paper and read it at leisure. We may thus be convinced to attend.

2.  Can read & may write – 360 PH has now changed the rules of the game and made available the papers or presentations even before the webinar itself. So now we can write.

So, I go back to the content of the above image – The gentleman on the right is Jim Leandro P Cano, a UP Los Baños professor, He is co-author of the technical paper “Mangrove Palms: Sustainable Feed Source for Swine” published  in the Journal of Environmental Science and Management Special Issue No 1 (2016), with Rheynalyn R Trivino & Craig B Jamieson, all of Next Generation Consultancy based in Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines.

Innovations: The 1^stinnovation I see is this visual & moving presentation of a virtual event displayed on Facebook. The 2^nd innovation is the new use of the mangrove or nipa palm (Nypa fruticans). The paper authors say that to avoid deforestation of areas for growing corn, “One solution is to cultivate trees and perennials for livestock feed.” They recommend the mangrove palm (Nypa fruticans), endemic in the Philippines, as “a game-changer in the swine industry” with its sap as swine feed. The calorific yield per hectare is 400% higher than that of maize, the common energy source for swine.

Now then, if the great many swine raisers switched from corn to the nipa sap as feed, they will greatly help control climate change by helping reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and methane.

May I add that there are 3 things that can happen when the nipa palm is tapped for its sap, that this will also encourage people to preserve current mangrove forests from which they can tap the nipa sap for sale, as well as entice people to reforest denuded mangrove swamps to grow the nipa palms in.

Citing Eufemio Rasco, the authors mention that nipa can thrive even in fresh and brackish waters. That means the nipa sap for pigs can be produced anywhere where there is a river or stream. How lucky can swine raisers get!?@517